Uneasy Allies: British-German Relations and European Integration since 1945

5
Britain, Germany, and the Deepening of
Europe: The Role of Domestic Norms
and Institutions

JIM BULLER AND CHARLIE JEFFERY

The parallel Intergovernmental Conferences (IGCs) on Economic and
Monetary Union (EMU) and Political Union which culminated in the
Maastricht Summit in December 1991 produced the most significant
extension of the scope of European integration since the Rome Treaties.
This in part continued the impetus established by the Single European
Act and the 1992 Single Market Programme it spawned, with further
steps in economic integration. In particular EMU came to be seen as
necessary to consolidate the Single Market and maintain Europe’s competitiveness in an increasingly internationalized economic environment.
In addition, the end of the cold war, and German unification in particular, added a new slant to the integration process. The end of the cold
war ‘unbound’ a German ‘Gulliver’1 hitherto tied down by the sclerotic
nature of cold war international relations. This image of an unrestrained
Germany revived one of the founding philosophies of the European
integration process: integrate in order to bind German power into multilateral structures.2 The result was a French-sponsored and Commissiondriven acceleration of the EMU agenda, based on the premise of taming
German economic power, as vested in the Bundesbank, in the framework
of a European Central Bank. Germany’s leadership under Chancellor
Helmut Kohl, keen to reiterate a now united Germany’s pro-integrationist
credentials, acquiesced in this agenda—but on the condition that parallel
steps be made towards Political Union. The two IGCs on EMU and
Political Union were thus launched in an unprecedented atmosphere of
urgency and improvisation. As a result, their agendas became unusually

1 The terminology is that of S. Bulmer and W. Paterson, ‘West Germany’s Role in Europe:
Man-Mountain or Semi-Gulliver?’, Journal of Common Market Studies 28 (1989); and W. Paterson,
‘Gulliver Unbound: The Changing Context of Foreign Policy’, in G. Smith et al. (eds.), Developments in German Politics (London, 1992).

2 See D. Spence, ‘The European Community and German Unification’, in C. Jeffery and
R. Sturm (eds.), Federalism, Unification and European Integration (London, 1993), 140–1.

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